The Homepage of Bob Chipman

Month: February 2012

I was a big fan of the first “Piranha 3D;” which I thought struck the appropriate balance between being sincerely-bad and self-consciously bad. The sequel (which apparently can’t decide whether or not to actually open in theaters) seems to be leaning more on the “self-conscious” side; with David Koechner as sleazebag entreprenuer who turns what I’m assuming was supposed to have been a family water park into Hooters-style operation with strippers as lifeguards and David Hasslehoff (as himself) paid to lounge around in his “Baywatch” getup, only to see the place invaded by the prehistoric piranha from the first film.

Christopher Lloyd and Ving Rhames are back, the later presumed dead at the end of the first film but evidently back and sporting bionic legs outfitted with anti-piranha weaponry. I’ll say this, I admire their lack of shame…

The new (final?) “Avengers” trailer has more action, more character-interaction and more “holy crap!” money shots, still playing hide-and-seek with the villains… though the post-credits beat has a pretty “WTF?” reveal.

Argue about what “that thing” is after the jump:

Well, that must be “The Leviathan” from those script-pages everyone was flipping out over a few months back. Question is, is that “something?” Fin-Fang-Foom? Giganto?

Deadline reports that Universal is setting up a feature-film adaptation of the 2009 Image comic“Cowboy Ninja Viking,” (which I bet get’s retitled as just “C.N.V.”) a riff on the Bourne setup of highly-trained, mentally-reconditioned assassins with a high(er)-concept twist: The brainwash-ees are mental-patients with Multiple Personality Disorder, the supposed benefit being that each individual personality is trained in a different discipline; hence the title character alternately has the “powers” of a Cowboy, a Ninja and a Viking (there is, apparently, also a Pirate Gladiator Ocenaographer.)

Y’know, because both “Snakes on a Plane” and “Cowboys & Aliens” were both massive, runaway boxoffice hits and all…

Hollywood? As someone who is pretty-much THE target audience for the “Ha-Ha-That-Sounds-Like-A-Fake-Thing-But-It’s-A-Real-Thing-So-I-Guess-Maybe-It’s-Awesome” genre you haven’t figured out isn’t working for you yet, lemme help you out here:

MOST OF THE AUDIENCE THAT FINDS “MEME”-STYLE HUMOR LIKE THIS TITLE FUNNY ARE PEOPLE WHO ARE *NEVER* GOING TO PAY FOR IT OR ANY OTHER MOVIE YOU MAKE. YOU MAY AS WELL JUST CALL IT “PIRATE TORRENT DOWNLOAD.”

Marvel has been hyping a new “Avengers” trailer set to debut Wednesday all week/weekend (the screening prints of “John Carter” are starting to ship this week, so one imagines the trailer will be attached to that) and to go along with it here’s a new, not-terribly-good poster.

Yeah… not very good – it’s like they looked at every tired post-2000 poster cliche (for superhero movies or otherwise) and decided to use them all: Over-glossy Michael Bay “sheen?” (which doesn’t match the crisp natural-daylight cinematographer we’ve seen so far) Check. Cap and Iron Man sans masks? Check. Dirt and embers flying around everywhere? Check. Obvious photoshop-collage with zero attempt to match light-sourcing? Check. Nobody seems to be looking-at or reacting to the same events (Cap and Widow are completely chill, something on the right is VERY disconcerting to Thor, Hulk and Hawkeye MIGHT be looking in the same general direction, none of them are noticing the giant explosion)

Check. I’m kinda wondering what’s with the (by now) familiar-looking blue light-beam coming out of what I assume is Stark Tower, but otherwise? Bleh. If not for the five pretty-good feature-length trailers that preceded it, you’d have to say this movie has a pretty underwhelming ad-campaign (though at least it’s not the disaster that Disney’s fumbling of “John Carter’s” promotion is shaping up to be…)

The lone bright-spot of the otherwise excerable 2012 Oscars was when Brad Pitt momentarily broke up the gooey solemnity of the evening’s weirdly-unfocused “Stuff You Like About Movies I Guess I Dunno Look We Had Like A Month To Throw This Shit Together After Ratner & Murphy Imploded Hey Look Popcorn Girls” theme by waxing straight-faced nostalgiac about an obscure giant monster movie in one of the interstitials. The movie? “War of The Gargantuas” – but, then, “Big Picture” fans already knew that:

We’re about five to six hours away from the bi-annual spectacle of Hollywood lavishing an embarassing amount of praise onto a Harvey Weinstein pickup that nobody will care about within a month. I’m thinking I’ll live-tweet the Oscars this year (unless circumstances don’t permit it) so if you’re not already following my Twitter @the_moviebob now would probably be a good time…I think what annoys me so much about the impending coronation of “The Artist” isn’t the film itself – as I’ve said elsewhere, it’s just an inoffensive little ball of feel-good nothing – but that it’s not even the best of the nominees at the things it does do: It’s not the best paean to Silents, that’s “Hugo” (flawed but ambitious beats well-executed mediocrity.) It’s not the best harmlessly-silly romantic comedy about The Good Old Days, that’s “Midnight in Paris” (which unlike “Artist” also manages to be ABOUT SOMETHING.)

“Moneyball” and “Descendants” are better “Older Gentleman Evaluating Life Choices” movies, “Tree of Life” wrings waaaaay more out of recreating the mid-50s than “Artist” gets out of the 20s… hell, I’d go so far as to say that “War Horse” does a better job channeling John Ford and Walt Disney than “Artist” does channeling it’s grab-bag of Silent influences (it also has a more likable Silent Protagonist than Benigni Dujardin, though to be fair that horse wouldn’t have been as funny in the OSS movies…) Honestly, the only nominees I can say it’s definitively superior to are “The Help” and “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close;” and at least both of those had a touch more ambition to them, conceptually.

Lawrence O’Donnell doesn’t rate among my favorite MSNBC personalities – he’s kind of sanctimonious and a scold, and doesn’t really “fit” super-well with the “Poly-Sci Debate Club Running The Asylum” vibe the network has been building for itself ever since Rachel Maddow replaced Olberman as the star attraction. Not as bad as Sharpton, though. (And now you know what Bob’s editing-background-noise is.)

Aaaaaaand there’s an “American Bob” I no longer need to write. Good show.

Of course, since it’s coming from MSNBC – clearly a tool of the Illuminati/Trilateral-Commission/Bilderberg/Bohemian-Grove/Zionist/Reptilian Globalist-Conspiracy if ever there was one! – Paul’s followers will merely pack on another layer of foil and disregard it out of hand. Well said, though.